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Laptop media keys



On Asus n55sf laptop, there are a dedicated keys for volume up, volume down, mute, [play/pause], stop, launch (plus a dozen Fn-key combinations).



In 12.10 most worked.



(Overall is seems unrelated to desktop environment used, stating it for the sake of completeness.)



On Ubuntu 12.10 under XFCE they just worked. That is: when a player like rhythmbox or totem was started, it would alternate between play and pause.



Interestingly, if several were started, they would alternate independently. E.g. use mouse to pause rhythmbox, launch totem, and one hit on [play/pause] key would pause one and resume the other.
Keys Next,Previous and Stop worked as expected in any program.



In 13.10 most still work, but play/skip related ignored.



On Xubuntu 13.10 (XFCE too) the volume keys work but the [play/pause], stop, next and prev are ignored. Not tried regular Ubuntu 13.10 (Unity).



Search before you ask



Here are a few facts:





Questions




  • How did it work in 12.10 ? Through udev ? Something else ?

  • Any other hint ?


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 Answers
5

Summary: sort-of solution.



Keys and rhythmbox (default Ubuntu 13.10 music player)



As a workaround I was considering to manually set specific events using XFCE shortcut keys facility.



So, I tried rhythmbox-client and observed that it failed to remote control rhythmbox as described on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rhythmbox/+bug/950743 .



As indicated there, "the problem was solved by enabling MPRIS D-Bus Interface plugin in rhythmbox", which in practice boiled down to :



sudo apt-get install rhythmbox-plugins


and restarting rhythmbox.



And then ... the four keys ([play/pause], stop, next and prev) that were ignored now just work.



So, the bug was not at lower levels but just the fact that the "MPRIS D-Bus interface" was unavailable.



Keys and gmusicbrowser (default Xubuntu 13.10 music player)



Keys did not work immediately with gmusicbrowser.



The symptoms are described on http://xubuntugeek.blogspot.com/2011/11/use-multimedia-keys-with-gmusicbrowser.html with a workaround.



They don't mix



Keys work with rhythmbox. If launching gmusicbrowser, it does not receive events.
Quitting rhythmbox allows gmusicbrowser to receive events.
Quitting gmusicbrowser does not allow rhythmbox to receive events.



So, it now works for simple cases (one music player at a time).


[#28576] Thursday, February 2, 2023, 1 Year  [reply] [flag answer]
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